Author
Topic: pak48.Excentrique (Read 100310 times)

You always wanted something special for Simutrans? Bored of the common and mainstream graphic sets?

Then, welcome to pak.Excentrique! It is ... colorful, it is ... unusual and! It's growing

I'm working on this since a while, and I have some hope to get it into a playable state. Right now there is a lot missing, and quite many of the graphics are only placeholders. A lot of the graphics details will change, but the colorful appearance is set.

If the swine flu doesn't get me, I'll do my best to get this off the ground

Smaller than I expected. I'm afraid I'm not anything near a pixel-artist. I still could get 2304 pixels wrong in your format (in 16x16 only 256 ).

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If you have ideas, or if you want to join, feel free to contact me

My ideas were to focus on gameplay itself, so: - Few different houses (basically for each level and type 1, no timeline)- Few different tourist attractions- Introduction of villages as non-growing cities by posing them as tourist attractions- Lots of small end-industries consuming only one product, fed by much bigger production factories (say 4 times bigger)- Lots of different industry chains- Provide for every waytype (road, train, ship, airplane, smalltrack, maglev, monorail)- For each waytype per decade 3 different choices for vehicles: cheap, fast or middle-of-the-road

But of course it's your pak, not mine. I don't know what your ideas are, or what you think about the things mentioned above.

Smaller than I expected. I'm afraid I'm not anything near a pixel-artist. I still could get 2304 pixels wrong in your format (in 16x16 only 256 ).

Hehe I have the other problem, formats that have too many pixels I feel overwhelmed and lost with.

I've got some ideas, but I think it's too early too present them yet. I'm too impatient, and wanted to show the graphics, but still there is too much just growing ... kind of, I work on something, and new ideas pop up, get tried, some work, some don't. So it's better not to tell much yet, because tomorrow it could be all different already again. In a few weeks when the core is set, also the ideas should stabilize.

Short term plans include a number of city buildings, enough for testing, and two modes of transportation, one based on roads and one based on rails. Also, more landscape elements.

Ideas for industry chains should grow while I'm working on the basics. I have two rough ideas - ideas what industries will mean in this set - and must decide for one before I can shape the chains.

I want to present all the well known Simutrans features in a new manner, so you can expect some surprising twists in this set

I'm working towards a first mode of transportation, and made a depot for them: Depot coils for energy cells. Maybe the names will change, energy cells is just a first idea. Feedback and ideas are welcome

Next on my list will be stops/stations and a few vehicles, so that one can set up transport lines.

One question I need to answer before I continue: Will icons in 24x24 pixels be alright, or should they be larger? Since this set uses 48x48 pixel tiles, I thought 24x24 icons might fit nicely. What do you think?

That should be doable. 24x24 is quite big for icons. Handicapped people might still have more difficulty to hit them, since they are smaller than the ones found in the other big pak sets. But they leave more screenspace for the map view ... if someone has good arguments for or against the icon size please speak up, since I don't want to make them twice.

What screen size and kind is likely to be the majority for intended players? There are many more factors apart from pure pixel numbers - display dpi, distance from viewer, brightness, even technology... In any case, what matters is how easy it is to recognize the icon on player's screen, not yours. (Or it is not the case - decide yourself )

Think HD monitors, using multiple screens, and on the other side of spectrum things like ipods or netbooks that achieve insane (for me) dpi. Making the actual controls too small to use = fail. And seeing screenshots from some people I tend to think our current standard size is getting obsolete...

Think HD monitors, using multiple screens, and on the other side of spectrum things like ipods or netbooks that achieve insane (for me) dpi. Making the actual controls too small to use = fail. And seeing screenshots from some people I tend to think our current standard size is getting obsolete...

Obsolete... in what way? Is it too big or too small?

As someone who has just recently changed from an old 17" tube monitor to a new modern TFT screen... I think 24x24 might just be too small. And even on smaller (but still high resolution) displays, like netbooks for example, I can imagine that these icons might be very small and hard to hit by mouse... which might might be a more serious disadvantage than the advantage of having more room for the actual map...

Seems like we agree then. Although I think the current 32x32 are still ok... and a good compromise over all. At least on my screen with 1920x1080 they are still fine for me. But I really wouldn't recommend anything smaller.

Did you perhaps notice that Vista made 48*48 icons default... which was possible at least since 98? Why change it now...?

OT: Actually no... I never worked with Vista - or Windows 7. (I'm happy to keep it that way with the former, but for the latter it is just a matter of time.) But if that is so (and I have no reason to doubt you) it might indeed be connected to the fact that average screen size kept growing bigger and bigger in the past. Checking through PC offers of today, I rarely see anything smaller than 22" (of course not for net- or notebooks).

Remember to keep some love for the old-school folks. I still use 1024x768 and have no intention of increasing that before it is forced upon me. Higher resolutions on the monitors I have now just make everything too small and hurt my eyes.

I was working on some new city elements, but I'm not quite pleased with the results:

I want to try some color coding: "residential" type buildings will be orange, "commercial" type buildings will be blue, and "industrial" type buildings will be red. This way it's quite easy to see how the city is structured. Simutrans intersperses commercial and residential buildings, but keeps industry to the city outskirts, or in industrial areas of their own.

I'll try to create some better buildings. But this preview might already give an idea.

To be completely honest, it may not fulfil my city-building dreams like currently pak96.comic seems to do best, but I fully support this idea, and I will give it a fair shake when it's playable. I think it's an awesome idea - and what other game has anything at all like this? OTTD, eat yer heart out! hehe

Making roads and rails always was a major pain in pak set creation, and it still is. I don't really want to count the hours that I have invested in the new powertrack, and it still needs some touching up for the tile joints. But at the moment I'm quite happy with the intermediate results, so I want to show them.

Powertracks will work a bit like roads, and support two lanes of floating vehicles on them. I tried to match their style with the depot coils. Also, I reworked one sort of city building, the blue blobshop. Now with more shiny! Well, actually I'm not quite sure if the new version is better than the old, but the pak set is still young and I'm experimenting a lot.

I've been quite nervous if the idea of a more exotic graphics set will liked, and I want to say I'm very glad about all the encouraging and positive feedback. Thank you

Edit:

Another preview, with improved crossings, and slight overall improvements of the powertracks.

The black cracks at tile borders will soon be fixed, too. Now onwards to stations and vehicles.